Learn how to code, package, deploy, and test functional Enterprise JavaBeans with the latest edition of this bestselling guide. Written by the developers of JBoss EJB 3.1, this book not only brings you up to speed on each component type and container service in this implementation, it also provides a workbook with several hands-on examples to help you gain immediate experience with these components.

With version 3.1, EJB's server-side component model for building distributed business applications is simpler than ever. But it's still a complex technology that requires study and lots of practice to master. Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 is the most complete reference on this specification. You'll find a straightforward, no-nonsense explanation of the underlying technology, including Java classes and interfaces, the component model, and the runtime behavior of EJB.

Develop your first EJBs with a hands-on walkthrough of EJB 3.1 concepts

Learn how to encapsulate business logic with Session Beans and Message-Driven Beans

Discover how to handle persistence through Entity Beans, the EntityManager, and the Java Persistence API

Andrew Lee Rubinger

As Senior Software Engineer at JBoss, a Division of Red Hat, Andrew Lee Rubinger is primarily responsible for development of the company's EJB 3.x implementation. He was an early adopter of Java EE technologies and an active contributor in the tech community.

The animals on the cover of Enterprise JavaBeans3.1, Sixth Edition, are a wallaby and her joey. Wallabies aremedium-sized marsupials belonging to the kangaroo family(Macropodidae; the second-largest marsupial family).They are grazers and browsers, native to Australia, and found in a varietyof habitats on that continent. Female wallabies have a well-developedanterior pouch in which they hold their young. When they are born, the tiny,still-blind joeys instinctively crawl up into their mothers’ pouches andbegin to nurse. They stay in the pouch until they are fairly well grown. Afemale wallaby can support joeys from up to three litters at once: one inher uterus, one in her pouch, and one that has graduated from the pouch butstill returns to nurse.

Like all Macropodidae, wallabies have long,narrow hind feet and powerful hind limbs. Their long, heavy tails are usedprimarily for balance and stability and are not prehensile. Wallabiesresemble kangaroos but are smaller: they measure from less than two feet toover five feet long, with the tail accounting for nearly half of their totallength. Oddly enough, although they can hop along quite quickly (reachingspeeds of up to 50 kilometers per hour), it is physically impossible forwallabies to walk backward!

The three main types of wallaby are brush, rock, and nail-tailed.There are eleven species of brush wallaby (genusMacropus) and six named species of rock wallaby(Petrogale). Brush wallabies usually live in brushlandor open woods. Rock wallabies, which are notable for their extreme agility,are usually found among rocks and near water. There are only three speciesof nail-tailed wallaby (Onychogalea), which are sonamed because of the horny growth that appears on the tip of their tails.The major threats to wallabies today are hunting, habitat destruction, andpredation by and competition with introduced species.

The cover image is from The Illustrated Natural History:Mammalia, by J. G. Wood. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond.The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed;and the code font is LucasFont’s TheSansMonoCondensed.

As far an an overview of the range and uses of EJB technology goes, this book was good at explaining the how and why of EJBs. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book was the lengths the author went to illustrate each concept with example code, as well as helpful analogies. The range of information, too, was quite comprehensive. Though at each point, it felt like the book was just scratching the surface.

I think, however, the book is somewhat limited by this as being a reference book. When the information was there, scouring the book often meant reading through sections to find the right piece of information somewhere in a paragraph. The lack of a glossary, too, meant that I was often consulting Google to make sure that I understood what was meant by a particular term.

Over 300 pages of source code in print, I think, would have been much better served as a download or as an accompanying CD, and would have made the physical book much more portable.

It's easy to nitpick the faults, but those complaints are minor compared to whether or not the product delivered what it set out to. It explained EJB technology quite well and did so without being an exercise in tedium. The book should give a better understanding of EJBs, and for that it's a worthy addition to any aspiring JavaEE developer's library.

I received this book as a free upgrade from the "Enterprise Java Beans 3.0" book. It is as valuable as the previous addition, with a deep look at the improvements in the new spec.

This updated book covers the new spec on EJB pretty decently and provides improved examples from it's predecessor.

However, as stated in my review for the previous edition, This is not a book for a beginner in Java and is not a book that is useful by itself. This book may be useful if you are doing a vendor certification (it helped me with SCBCD), but if you are looking for a book to lead you into JEE, I recommend the outdated but still relevant "J2EE In a Nutshell" if you are looking for a reference book. This (EJB 3.1) book would be excellent with a few more helpful examples on setting up resources like RDBMS and even a simple Servlet would certainly assist in making this book more useful. Why?

This book shows us how SLSB's and SFSB's which is all well and provides examples on their relevance to interacting with Entity Beans, but how does one connect to a RDBMS? It only briefly touches on this. Ok so you managed to get the data, but how about little example on displaying some retrieved data into just a Servlet (for the beginner)?It is extremely well written though as I still used it to study for SCBCD and passed (with the previous version).

I was not a big fan of EJBs as the previous versions of the spec left me baffled and frustrated. I kept away from learning EJBs as not one at my work place seemed to care about them either. With EJB 3.1 there has been a renewed interest on this topic and so I started reading "Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition - O'Reilly".

I think the authors have done a good job starting with the basics in the first section of the book explaining what the purpose of EJBs are and how the container takes care of providing services so we can focus on writing the business logic instead of re-writing plumbing and cross-cutting code.

Section two of the book provides chapters of the book provide a coverage on the various types of beans with practical examples on when each is suitable to use. I really enjoyed this section of the book as I could relate it with my daily life as a programmer.

Section three and four focus on Entity beans and Container services but I read them lightly as I don't have much interest in going too deep into those. Section five of the book wraps up with lots of practical examples (like recipes) on each bean type. I enjoyed reading this section of the book as well.

Overall, I think this book is much better than reading the EJB 3.1 spec online and the authors have done a great job in bringing the spec to life with practical examples and simplified language.

After reading the first pages about session beans are. I still didn't have a clue. The writer did not completely write this book for persons who knows nothing about EJB. For me as a student it's vital that I get a good understanding about the what (theory), before I can do the how (programming). I am the kind of person that wants to know things in detail. If I can't puzzle all the little bits of information together then the information is usefull but incomplete.

Bottom line: if you write about something, then write it completely or don't write about it at all.

I am giving a rating of 4/5 because it would serve the programmer who knows more.

In short, I enjoyed reading this book. Ages ago I had read Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans by Ed Roman to learn more about EJB 2 but overall I was not impressed by that book at all. Seemed to be very verbose and boring to me. I had glanced through the JavaEE 5 tutorial as well and again, more or less, I disliked it.

However I enjoyed reading this book much better. With the exception of the Casino example that was a very poor choice in my opinion, reading the book was fun and it was concise and helped me to freshen up my memories --- I hadn't used EJB in the past couple of years due to working on legacy non-JEE apps.